asked the Minister for Labour the total number of people at present involved in/or attending work experience courses or involved directly or indirectly in temporary employment funded by any of the agencies under his control.
Ceisteanna—Questions. Oral Answers. - Work Experience Courses.
4.
At present 2,326 persons are employed under the work experience programme operated by the National Manpower Service. Participants in a number of Department of Education, AnCO, CERT and YEA financed courses also receive work experience as part of their course.
The two temporary employment programmes are the social employment scheme and Teamwork.
Will the Minister tell the House the number of people involved in work experience courses, on part-time work or on training courses?
I have more information on this topic and I will give it to the Deputy when replying to a later question.
Will the Minister tell the House the total number of people who were funded in one way or another through grants from his Department?
The total provision for all the schemes amounts, in terms of man years — I used that phrase because some people might be employed for six months — to 45,356 for 1986.
It is often said, and it has some legitimacy in a debate on manpower, that if those people were not involved in part-time work experience courses they would be unemployed. Will the Minister agree that, if one goes on that basis, the real number of unemployed is 300,000?
I do not accept what the Deputy is saying. He is implying, although it is not his intention, that those who are involved in work experience programmes are not being trained and are not in the process of going on to take up a job. By adopting his logic one could say that every medical student is unemployed because he or she is not currently working although they will end up getting a job. The vast majority of those who participate in these schemes go on to gain employment. The placement rate of AnCO is of the order of 60 per cent. Obviously, that figure varies from course to course and person to person. I do not think one should adopt the procedure suggested by Deputy Ahern and say that if it were not for this intervention the unemployment rate would be 45,000 people extra.
One may argue that the figure is not 45,000 but it is my opinion that a substantial number of those people could be included in the figure. Even if I accepted the Minister's argument that some of those people will receive jobs when they finish the training courses, although that is questionable, the unemployment level is still more than 20 per cent.